


my skin should crack and peel

by nex_et_nox



Series: no spirit dare stir abroad [1]
Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: F/F, Fix-It of Sorts
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-03-20
Updated: 2014-03-20
Packaged: 2018-01-16 08:55:01
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,092
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1339534
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nex_et_nox/pseuds/nex_et_nox
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Lydia holds in her tears and her screams and curls up at the roots of the nemeton.</p>
            </blockquote>





	my skin should crack and peel

i.

She’s checking on Stiles when she feels the sword push through her stomach. When she looks down, there’s no wound and she knows that she’s not the one who was stabbed.

Lydia can’t breathe but she screams and cries and feels something break inside her.

* * *

ii. 

They bury Allison quickly, in a quiet ceremony. It’s only the pack; she didn’t have too many close friends outside of them.

Everyone’s told she died in a car crash.

Lydia barely manages to approach the coffin, to gaze down at that pale face, too set and serene. Allison had never looked like that.

Lydia can taste Allison’s death, a scream that has been released but is also still caught at the back of her throat. She leans over and brushes her lips against cold ones and doesn’t let the tears fall.

* * *

iii.

Lydia finds herself back at the graveyard that night. The moon is dark above her and she drives a silver-tipped arrow, salvaged from the battle, into the ground at the head of the grave.

Then she begins to dig.

Later, she wakes up at the nemeton. There’s a large patch of disturbed earth around its roots and dirt has buried itself deep beneath nails that are cracked and bleeding.

She’s not surprised.

* * *

iv.

“Why didn’t you listen to me, Allison? Why did you come?”

Lydia thinks she knows, but she’ll never be able to ask.

* * *

v.

Wormwood and wolfsbane spring up around the nemeton, out of season and overly abundant.

Lydia thinks of how _artemisia absinthium_ leaves glow silver in moonlight and takes back the arrow she placed in the cemetery. She gives it a more fitting home, closer to the hands that wielded it in life.

* * *

vi. 

“It really didn’t hurt,” she tells Chris. She knows Scott has already told him this, but she takes it upon herself to visit him and repeat it, because he’s even more broken than her.

“And you would know,” Chris snorts, bitter, cruel.

“Yes,” Lydia says steadily. “I felt it, too.”

* * *

vii. 

Sometimes she visits the nemeton, curls at its roots and traces the edges of leaves and flowers around her; she talks to Allison, tells her what she’s been missing. She brings chocolate and splits the bar in half, buys two pints of ice cream and leaves one to melt while she slowly eats the other.

She sketches out bows and arrowheads and quivers, burns the papers and buries the ashes in the ground or blows them into the wind. She carves words into the nemeton --  _Allison,_ _archer,_ _nous_ _protégeons ceux qui ne peuvent pas se protéger eux mêmes_  -- and flinches at each cut because it hurts the great tree almost as much as it hurts her, but she keeps writing until all the words are complete. 

* * *

viii.

(Away, the nogitsune screams because its new soldiers no longer belong to it. They turn against it slowly, fewer appearing before it each night, and it doesn’t understand because the Oni  _belonged_ to it, it _won_ them!

It whips its tails in frustration but never thinks to go to the source of their power. It thinks that the old vixen has laid one last trap and this is why the Oni won’t obey it.

It is wrong.)

* * *

ix.

When Allison left the door ajar, she saw her aunt. She saw Kate crawling toward her, pulling herself out of her grave, and Lydia had shuddered at the description because it reminded her of Peter.

Now, Lydia almost wishes she could see even a facsimile of Allison, beyond the spaces she’s hollowed out around the nemeton and inside herself, or that she could find some spell for raising the dead. She looks, but most of what she knows is what Peter implanted in her mind and pertains only to werewolves. The Argents’ bestiary is no help, and she doesn’t know where else to turn because how could she find anything that would be reputable? And if she did, how would she know?

It makes her want to scream.

She doesn’t.

* * *

x. 

Her mother barely notices that there is something wrong with her. When she finally does, it is only with a passing comment.

“You’ve been quiet lately,” her mom says.

Lydia looks at her levelly. My best friend is dead, she doesn’t say. I dug her up and buried her where she could still protect, she doesn’t add. I hardly talk to anyone except her now.

“Yeah,” she mutters. She looks back down at her most recent sketch, another arrow, and crumples it into a ball. She doesn’t feel like drawing at the moment.

* * *

xi.

Allison has been dead for a month.

Lydia goes to sleep and wakes up at the nemeton. But it’s not the nemeton of the waking world that she sees; it’s the one in between, the one in the white room.

Except even that isn’t true, because this isn’t the nemeton that’s been cut down and cracked and carved into. This is the nemeton in its glory, branches arching high up towards the ceiling. Wolfsbane and wormwood still sprawl around its roots, and there is a girl sitting halfway up the tree. Her legs dangle and her dark hair is unbound. A quiver of arrows rests against her back.

Allison smiles down at Lydia and she is beautiful and so, _so_ alive. 

* * *

xii.

In the waking world, Lydia makes her way to the nemeton and rests a palm against its stump. She can feel the pulse of power and life and there is the tiniest hint of a sapling trying to force its way up from the center of the stump.

Someday, the nemeton will be a tree again. It will take a long time and it may never be fully restored to how it was before, but branches will strain toward the sky and the roots will dig themselves deeper than ever and the nemeton is the heart of power of Beacon Hills, but Allison is the spirit of the nemeton.

Deep in her bones, Lydia can feel it:

Beacon Hills is protected.

So long as the nemeton flourishes with its new life – so long as _Allison lives_ as its spirit – Beacon Hills is protected.

* * *

xiii.

Lydia doesn’t feel like screaming anymore.

* * *

xiv.

(Allison’s arrows and quivers and bows always shift in Lydia’s dreams, and she recognizes the ones that she has made for Allison, the ones that she has burned and buried next to the nemeton.

Allison carries them all proudly.)

* * *

xv.

(This time, when Lydia kisses Allison, her lips are warm.)


End file.
